Some rumours have been floating around regarding Intel's X299 platform, with reports of an upcoming Skylake-X refresh with higher core clock speeds and a soldered IHS for enhanced cooling potential.

It is believed that these parts will offer core clock speed improvements of 150-200MHz in the base/boost clock speeds for each SKU, with the soldered IHS offering enhanced overclockability over the company's original Skylake-X series of CPUs.

Kaby Lake-X will not be receiving a refresh, likely due to disappointing sales for Intel's entry-level X299 SKU. It seems like nobody wanted to buy a higher clocked Kaby Lake-S CPU with a more expensive motherboard with a limited feature set that lacks an integrated GPU.

Cascade Lake is reportedly delayed until 2019, creating space for a refreshed Skylake lineup within the CPU market.

HardOCP has also reported that Intel may be working on a high-TDP (275-300W) version of their 12 and 14-core Skylake-X CPUs, offering extreme levels of single-threaded and multi-threaded CPU performance, though these CPUs will no doubt be limited to select high-TDP capable motherboard designs.

It would be this. For the first time ever I took a deep look into shrinking a couple of weeks back (like three days of reading and learning) and yeah, it really isn't as easy as I thought it was. Or cheap.

This is great news. Intel probably just did the math that the loss in yield due to failed assembly with soldering doesn't compare to the loss in HEDT to AMD. This will for sure make their bench mark numbers look a lot better and just might pull me away from x99. I'm also very interested if they're going to be messing with the L level caches and "maybe" just "maybe" enabling ECC in the memory controller for the first time on their Client WS level CPU's in reaction to Threadripper... I know it will make a lot of dev's and power users very :-) :-) :- ) :-)Quote

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